


First Day

by Beth Harker (Beth_Harker)



Category: Newsies (1992)
Genre: Canon Era, M/M, Post canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-16
Updated: 2014-07-16
Packaged: 2019-09-28 13:28:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 655
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17183873
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beth_Harker/pseuds/Beth%20Harker
Summary: In which Jack and David have a troublesome daughter and live in Santa Fe together.





	First Day

Rebecca Louise did not make it halfway through her first day of Kindergarten. The call went out to Amelia, Larry the farmhand’s wife, on account of the fact that Jack and David had never been able to make up the money for a phone line of their own. She came running out into the field where Jack and Larry were working, apron smudged and mousy-brown hair in disarray.

“It’s little Rebecca,” she said. “I don’t know what’s happened, only that you must go to the school quickly!”

Jack’s heart leapt into his throat at that, his head filling with every possible thing that could go wrong for his little daughter, from stampeding horses to sudden (and very localized) tornadoes sweeping her off into the sky. There were realistic scenarios as well, but somehow those were even worse, visions of falls taken, accidents, pretty brown curls caked in blood. He barely even had to glance at Larry. The other man understood, and a quick nod from him served as the only permission that Jack needed to take off like a shot in the direction of the school.

When David got home from work at the training hospital at seven o’clock, he was not greeted with any hint if disaster. Rebecca sat cheerfully in the arm chair (the only piece of decent furniture in the shack the three of them called a home, and the one thing in the house that she had claimed as exclusively hers), flipping through a picture book of sea creatures that she has fallen in love with. Jack met him at the doorway of their home, kissing him quickly as soon as it was shut behind them.

“That kid is your daughter through and through,” Jack said, gripping both of David’s arms as he spoke. He looked sheepish and worried, but with a hint of amused pride and a brightness to his eyes that couldn’t be hidden. David had long since ceased to question why Jack felt the need to ascertain so often that Rebecca was his, in spite of there not being a hint of David’s blood in her. He knew that he had an influence that stretched beyond biology, and mostly for nefarious purposes, since all it ever seemed to do was get Rebecca in trouble.

“Go ask her,” Jack encouraged.

Biting back a sigh, David went to sit down on the arm of Rebecca’s seat.

“Did you know that the only parts of the world that the scientists haven’t mapped out are all under the water?” Rebecca asked. She glanced up at David with honey-colored eyes that were so much like Jack’s that David couldn’t be surprised when she talked day and night about the ocean, as though it were her own personal Santa Fe.

“Did you tell your teacher that?” David asked. He ran a hand through her hair. He’d put it in a neat braid for her that morning, but it had come undone, and there was something sticky in it.

“Teacher expelled me for one week.”

David’s hand stilled. He looked up at Jack in surprise, and then back at Rebecca.

“What did you do?” David asked. “I mean, what happened?”

“I was telling my new best friend Linda about seahorses, but teacher told me to be quiet, so I just told her that I have as much of a right to talk as she does. Then I reminded her that there were twenty-eight children in that classroom, and just one stinken’ teacher. We had her outnumbered, see?”

Jack’s shoulders were shaking now, his hand in front of his mouth covering the grin that David knew must be nearly splitting his face apart.

Calmly, Rebecca flipped forward several pages in the book, to the page about giant squids, which was her favorite.

“I saw fear in teacher’s eyes today,” she said, without looking up at her book. “But I’m sure we can come to a compromise.”


End file.
